


Of Inappropriately Timed Stockings and Bleach

by Sqwirlgrl



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fluff, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), Light Angst, M/M, The Ineffable Plan (Good Omens), dusty bookshops, reading Things on the Internet too late at night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-27 05:22:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19784107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sqwirlgrl/pseuds/Sqwirlgrl
Summary: Aziraphale is getting just a bit more Bastard than usual these days, and Crowley suspects whose fault it is. And on top of that, he's running out of movie titles about angels to mock his boyfriend with.





	Of Inappropriately Timed Stockings and Bleach

**Author's Note:**

> There really aren't that many instantly recognizable titles of movies about Angels, you know.

“Bastard.”

Aziraphale fairly slammed the phone back on its cradle with an honest-to-God muttered curse.

Crowley looked up over his glasses from his paper and raised an eyebrow. Crowley still read the paper much like you might skim your exes’ Instagram. 

“What’s wrong, Touched By an Angel? Not of a mind to sell, then?”

“Oh, he’ll certainly sell it! For only twenty times what he bought it for in an estate sale, never mind the condition he’s been storing it in. Doesn’t even know what he has, not that he would care if he did, the lazy scalper...”

He trailed off in a storm of angry mumbles. Crowley watched a very cranky Principality rearrange the papers on his desk, only for the aura of love and care to effortlessly break through the clouds again when he spied a dusty book jacket that sparked joy. Christ on a cracker, but he wished he was still in the cursing business and could have done something about Marie Kondo before his idiot boyfriend could hear about it. Word under the street was that she was an ancient power of neither Heaven nor Hell and would be there at the Rapture to Tidy the souls of the Unworthy, but this was as yet unconfirmed. 

In either case, anger and resentment ran so counter to Zira's nature that they couldn’t stick to him. No, those were Crowley’s constant mood-du-jour, like a shitty diner's chicken noodle Soup of the Day that they just keep adding more to every dinner service as it gets saltier and saltier into eternity. Only Aziraphale’s beatific smiles ever seemed to last on him. 

That little outburst must be just another little bit of tarnish that had come from Crowley—since he’d cut off contact with Heaven and they’d spent more and more time together, more little flashes of pique, rebellion, and even--saints and demons preserve us--profanity had been showing through. Aziraphale of even thirty years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of calling a mortal a bastard lest Michael look at him askance while wishing him a lovely day. But even before his split with Heaven, Crowley had noticed moments of decidedly in-angelic behavior. Just try selling him anything less than a perfectly fresh tiramisu.

Crowley affected a look of offended virtue, and manifested some actual pearls to clutch (and the Nanny Ashtoreth stockings and stiletto heels, not that Aziraphale were the type to ever notice or appreciate Crowley's finer seductive touches, the bitch.)

“Saints alive, first you cast aspersions upon the circumstances of his birth, then accuse him of unforthrightness in his business dealings? Are you some kind of monster?"

"Increasingly, more than likely."

Bugger him with a boat oar, but he hated it when Zira dipped into melancholic self-loathing, especially when it was his fault. 

Avoiding the talk-about-our-feelings option like it was a homeless person asking for help, he defaulted to the much more comfortable and familiar maladaptive behavior of redirecting hatred back onto himself. 

"Oh aye. Calm down Angels in the Outfield, when do you think all that started? What could possibly have prompted it?" 

He expected to hear something like, “when I started getting coffee on Wednesdays with a satanic fiend, Curséd and Hated of his Creator”, would have liked to hear “when you finally helped me understand the truth about Heavens hypocrisy and tyranny”, and would have LOVED to hear “when I saw you step out of the shower last week and very nearly rumpled my bow tie out of sheer lust,” but what he got instead was:

“When they rejected you.”

There was none of that cloyingly sweet tone he used when he was trying to convince mortals that the world was a wonderful place and it was all organized by a powerful being who loved them and gave a single shit about their lives. For once in his existence, Crowley was rendered looking foolish and speechless. 

(That wasn't actually true--this was the second time. Lurking deep down a clickhole one night, drawn to depravity like a dog rolling in a dead possum, he had found some Book of Genesis fan fiction, there being 3.2 THOUSAND works on the Bible on fanfiction.net, what the actual living fuck, and had found a work about the Serpent's relationship with both Adam AND God that had "Cloaca" in the title, and he had had to have a good lie down after that. He had actually Googled "If one was to literally bleach their own brain, where would one apply the medicine dropper to wipe short term memory", and bugger him if it hadn't returned a page on WebMD.) 

But now, for the love of all that's profane, now Zira is looking over this way and it's that Look, the one radiating pure uncut sincerity and soul-baring vulnerability that promises if he's hurt or mocked right now he will literally die and still forgive you afterwards, and he's saying: 

"I stopped believing in Heaven's justice when they cast you down, never to be forgiven, as kind and as wonderful as you are. And then I stopped believing in Heaven's mercy when--what was that program we watched together? Housewives of Atlanta? When I realized that when Heaven says "Bless your Soul", they mean it like how a southern lady from the colonies means it, like it's really "Fuck off and die, Bitch." 

If the Look hadn't killed him, the absurd anachronism and the prim way he carefully articulated "fuck off and die, bitch" was surely now going to. Well, fuck, and now his throat was tight. He didn’t even need a throat, could have stored spare tyre pressure gauges in it if he liked, or handy droppers of bleach, and yet it was idiotically tightening up at the words of his stupid angel. His stupid, perfect, sum-total-of-everything-good-and-right-in-this-tasteless-joke-of-a-universe-with-no-punchline angel. And he's in fucking sheer black backseam stockings and a three inch heel. 

In Crowley’s impressively repressed psyche, the homeless person was now asking for food and talking about his military service. “The fuck you on about, It's a Wonderful Life?” (And he SQUEAKED a bit as he said it! Him! The literally Goddamned Serpent of Eden! He thinks he really will start storing spare tyre gauges in his worthless throat now.)

“I thought it was wrong when it happened, and I knew it was wrong once I met you. You are just another angel, if a bit unnecessarily sarcastic, dear, and if you weren’t Good then I rather started wondering whether Good was, in actual fact, everything Gabriel and Michael said it was. I knew She must have some other plan for you, and that Heaven didn’t really know what that was. And I was right.”

Crowley closed his mouth and stared at him for one beat. Two beats. Three. And then he decisively clicked over the floorboards to take his angel by the wrist and lead him into the back offices where he couldn’t be seen kissing the fool until no one alive remembered who the Beatles had been.


End file.
